Buttery Scottish Shortbread

Traditional Scottish shortbread is crisp, crumbly and just barely sweet. Delicious in it's simplicity!

Ingredients:

2 cups salted butter

3/4 cup sugar

2 tbsps vanilla

4 cups flour, sifted

Cream the butter and sugar together in a large mixer bowl and beat 2 minutes until fluffy. Add the vanilla, then add the flour in 4 additions mixing until a soft dough forms.  Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate to chill. The original recipe said to chill it for 1 hour but I found it too hard and had to leave it out on the counter before using it so don't chill too long. 

Line 2 - 8 X 8" baking pans with parchment leaving enough to use as "handles" later. Divide the dough in half and press each into the pans. Cover with plastic then use something flat, like this mini loaf pan, to smooth out the surface.

Score the bars about halfway through the dough and poke with a skewer or fork. Also at this point you can score the ragged edges so that once baked you will have nice clean edges on your cookies. And, oops, those cookies in the foreground didn't get smoothed out very well. Guess they'll be the "testers"!

Bake at 350°F for 40 minutes. Remove the pans from the oven to cool for 20 minutes, leaving the oven on during this time.

Now using the parchment handles, carefully lift the whole thing out onto the counter. Using a serrated knife, and using a sawing motion, cut through the cookie score marks and place the individual cookies on a cookie sheet. 

Now turn off the oven and put the cookies back into the warm oven for 20 minutes to crisp.

Cool and store in an airtight container.

Original recipe from RockRecipes.com